michael cooper – Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast

SFFMP 147: Mastering Facebook Advertising for Authors with Michael Cooper

August 29, 2017 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

We had a great show tonight with Michael Cooper, the author of HELP! My Facebook Ads Suck and also a science fiction author writing under M.D. Cooper. He’s been experimenting constantly with Facebook ads and had some amazing advice, a lot of it different from what we’ve heard before (Lindsay, who hates Facebook ads, is tempted to give them another try!), and the proof is in the pudding. He went from very modest sales to having months where he made $25,000+ from his science fiction novels (and no, he didn’t spend $30,000 on Facebook to make that much — Lindsay asked).

The show was so jam packed with information that we’re not going to attempt to touch on everything in the show notes here, but here’s a little of what Michael talked about:

Why you should never use your book cover (or any text at all) in the image of a Facebook ad.
Michael’s spreadsheet to help you figure out the read-through rate in your series, how much you’re earning per customer you get into your funnel, and how much you can afford to spend to acquire a reader.
The PDF file Michael mentioned: Facebook Ads for Fun and Profit v2.
Why you should start ads at $5 a day max and only increase the spend if they prove they’re doing well.
Creating a fan page to launch your advertising campaigns from instead of a business page.
Using Books2Read as a place to direct readers if you’re creating ads to appeal to readers on all platforms and not just sending them straight to Amazon.
Why Michael isn’t a fan of using Facebook ads to build a mailing list — he sends people straight to buy his books.
Doing long-form sales copy rather than simply creating a short snippet.
Why you should create different ads for different countries instead of just targeting all English-speaking countries.
Why Michael prefers to run ads on 99-cent or full-priced ebooks rather than permafree titles.
Creating character-based ad copy to appeal to female readers versus more plot-based copy for male readers.